killing one in four men, women, and children;
herring declined in the Baltic in the 15th century;
then the harbor at Bruges filled with silt, cutting
the town off from the sea; and the Thirty Years'
War (1618-1648) shattered the political map
of Europe.
By 1670 the league was all but finished.
Atlantic to the Urals, there is a Hanse
atic renaissance," said Gustav Robert
Kniippel, former mayor of Lubeck.
The city of Rostock, now Hansestadt
Rostock, renamed itself in the spirit of the old
league, as did several other towns in former East
Germany. Rostock's soccer club, the Hansa,
chose a cog as its symbol. Workmen in Gdanisk,
meanwhile, started restoring a ceremonial gate
house as a hall for Hanseatic meetings. And in
1992 Estonia's capital, Tallinn, played host to a
modern-style Hansetag, or regional parliament,
where the mayors of each city, wearing the gold
chains of their office, marched in procession
to banquets.
There is even talk of turning the Baltic area,
with some 50 million people, into one of Europe's
new economic super-regions. Representatives of
ten Baltic nations met three years ago at Rostock
to discuss ways of promoting trade among them.
"Our Hanseatic heritage is part of our genetic
information like our fingerprints," said Trivimi
Velliste, a former foreign minister who helped
Estonia win independence from the Soviet Union
in 1991. "We can't help feeling a connection with
the rest of northern Europe."
Poised on the eastern edge of the Hanseatic
world, Tallinn, called Reval in medieval times,
was treasured as the gateway to Russia. The
Danes conquered the town in the early 13th cen
tury, then sold it to the Teutonic Knights, who
soon brought Ltibeck law and league membership. Rising boldly from
a sheltered bay, the city's gray stone walls and fortified hilltop citadel
still give Tallinn the look and feel of a frontier settlement.
"We are definitely living on the edge," said Velliste. "I am very
worried about the future. But if Russia remains a democracy, we
Estonians would like to do the same job that we did in Hanseatic
times, to be a middleman between east and west."
"The idea has a lot of sex appeal," said Konrad Lammers, an econ
omist at Kiel University. "But I'm afraid the economies of the West,
such as Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, are too far ahead of those in
the underdeveloped East, such as Estonia, which has a per capita
income only a tenth as much. Integrating these two worlds could take
a generation or two to accomplish."
Young Estonians, though, aren't waiting for their elders to lead the
way. As a market economy takes shape in their formerly communist
On the wave-lashed Elbe,
the Freeand HanseaticCity
of Hamburg remains the
heartiestsurvivor of league
days. Its reach extends to
some 1,200 ports, many
times more than in the
1500s. Now free from
Soviet restrictions,old
ports like Tallinn, Estonia,
National Geographic, October 1994